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Little is more important for your success than a loyal audience.
Dare I say it’s as important as the product?
Happily, it requires little funding to build a loyal
audience. You can certainly accomplish it faster with
money but all you really need to do is invest your
time.

When, at last, your product is ready to sell, sell less like
a marketer and more like a door-to-door salesman. Those first few
customers will help you discover the kinks in your product before
making big investments. As you grow confident in your
final product, you’ll need to start expanding your reach. Do this
before you run a KickStarter or take out loans.

Take a lesson from consultants and focus on creating demand
before worrying about meeting supply. There are tons of
consultants who build blog audiences much larger than the number
of clients they could ever serve, which boosts the fee the
clients they do take are willing to pay.

You can create that same high demand, low
supply perception of scarcity, that will allow you
to charge higher prices. Consumers understand scarcity
leads to higher prices. The air of exclusivity also makes
your early customers feel like “insiders,” something they will
likely rave about to their friends.

Creating this demand on an extremely limited budget comes
down to being your own media outlet. Here are a few pointers that
can help you make that work:

1. Useful information. Focus on providing
valuable information to specific audiences. The information
doesn’t need to be unique, just new to your audience.
Provide information that is entertaining,
memorable, share-worthy and useful. Tell your audience
something they can put it to use in their own lives. That is
the secret sauce that keeps them coming back and sharing,
rather than just liking what you have to say.

2. Encourage sharing. The information must
be shareable. Accomplishing that means being new as well as
funny, cute, transformative, relatable, emotionally impactful,
surprising and making the sharers feel “in the know.”

3.Mix it up. In-depth content
keeps an audience, bite-size content attracts an
audience on social networks and other platforms. Span
the range from in-depth to bite-size.

4. Audience. Building an email list
should be at the center of any self-funded entrepreneur’s
marketing strategy. Nothing is more important than a loyal
audience. You won’t get one on social networks or search engines,
where your content’s exposure is subject to the whims of
algorithms you don’t control. These are good places to earn
exposure. They aren’t places to keep an audience.

5. Unique is overrated. Some marketers take
the idea of being “unique” too far. It’s okay to keep selling the
same message over and over again, as long as you’re selling it to
new people. Spend 20 percent of your time creating
content, 80 percent of your time promoting your content. If
you spend a full day on a piece of content, spend a solid four
days reaching out to influential people and engaging on forums
and social networks to promote it. No matter how many people
saw your content, there are always more people who can
benefit from seeing it.

6.Just enough. It’s not
about how much content you produce, it’s about how pleased your
audience is with each piece of content, and how loyal it makes
them. In fact, in a world of clogged inboxes, less is often more.

7. Community. Audience interaction is key. An
academic
case study published in the Journal of Marketing Research
about Kiva, a non-profit microlending organization,
attributed 30 times more sales to fluctuations in forum
posts than to fluctuations in media coverage. Community activity
drove traditional media coverage, not the other way around. It’s
absolutely crucial that you get your audience talking with
itself.

8. Mix it up more. Mix things up with
podcasts, interviews, videos, photos, visual information,
e-pamphlets and free or freemium software tools. Make the
experience as interactive as possible. Involve influencers and
audience members. Quote authorities and forum posts. Be a
part of something larger than yourself.

A loyal audience means your KickStarter will succeed
and you’ll have enough pre-orders to mainstream your
product, which will make it easier to get funding when you
need it. A loyal audience will get you through any
short-term failure or mistake that would easily cripple a
churn-and-burn business. If things get really bad, your audience
will help dig you out of the hole.